‘He arrives in Peru. He arrives in Wales. He arrives in Paris. That feeling; arrival for the first time. How things look. A whole new world! He commences his conversation with things. A world of grey areas rendered in black and white. His road is not one of exploitation, of turning people into mere props, stand-ins for an already subtle subtext. Whole worlds coalesce around a single detail: a hat, a smile, a hand. Picture this: his ear to the ground and his eyes on the margins, awake to the markers of a secret language of time’
(Penman, 2004:24)
Robert Frank was one of the first photographers to effectively give consideration to creating a photographic project that rejected positivism why simultaneously retaining fidelity to his subject. This rationalistic approach informed his work that was to become The Americans (Frank, 1978). The book contains a body of images that sees the photographs act as concerns in an inductive reasoning exercise, where the goal is to reveal the deep-seated societal issues that simmer below a shiny American surface. By using the poetic sequencing of images in such a way that the viewer is signposted towards the hard-bitten conclusion shared by the photographer, who saw the aggrandisement of the cynical, but freedom loving America edification, as ‘the kind of civilization born here and spreading elsewhere’ (Frank, 2009:xix) . That is to say that America is a paradoxical, self-interested nation immune to criticism, plagued by inequality and racism, infatuated with religion, celebrity and the pursuit of the American dream. But also, a country that embraced ‘freedom, action, movement and above all risk taking’ (Greenough, 2009:2).
Frank was a tenacious individual, early on in life he knew he had to get out of his native Switzerland. It was there where he was taught how to organize himself and photograph effectively and logically (The Genius of Photography, 2009). When he first arrived in New York in 1947 he made it his business to get in contact with, and study, his contemporaries such as Walker Evans and Edward Steichen (Greenough, 2009:3). The quiet and well-connected Evans encouraged Frank to get through the Guggenheim Fellowship application in 1955 (Guggenheim, 2020), providing a high-profile reference and help with the final drafting (Rosenheim, 2009:150).
‘To photograph throughout the U.S.A. and to centre the attention on industrialisation. The people in the midst of this era of progress and the effect it has upon them. The aspirations of manual workers in comparison to white collar employees. Maybe the picture will be different in various places, or then it might be surprisingly similar in places far apart…
I don’t think that this should be a carefully planned trip, but that the photographs – with some text – should be a spontaneous record of a man seeing this country for the first time (except N.Y.). I feel that the U.S is the country that is evolving more rapidly than any other country and that my project is bound to be incomplete, but I am sure that it will be vivid and valuable report. Such a project can only be executed by complete independence’.
(Frank, 2009:151)
The Americans is a seminal work and has been widely lauded (Powell 2009:xiv). John Szarkowski (1978:16) describes it as one of the three most ‘important events in American photography during the fifties’ and Bill Jay (1969:23) commented that ‘The Americans… must be the most famous photo-essay ever produced’. Frank’s existentialist view of America was ‘based on a sophisticated social intelligence’ (sic) and a commitment ‘to a highly personal vision of the world, and to the proposition that photography could, in aesthetic terms, clarify that vision’ (1978:17), a vision which ‘changed the course of twentieth-century photography’ (Tully 2009:44).
Frank’s reckoning of America does not have a purely photographic origin. While embracing the ‘poetry of the Beats’ (Greenough, 2009:35) movement, he became an associate of the poet Allen Ginsberg (b.1926-1997), whom he taught photography (Sante, 2009:208), and friends with the author Jack Kerouac (b.1922-1969) who would later go in to write the introduction to The Americans. By osmosis Frank came to place their poetic philosophy of ‘first thought, best thought’ (Ginsberg, 1980:112) at the heart of his photographic practice. His work represented a converse approach from what would be considered a traditional documentary recording of a subject, by moving to ‘a more poetically adventurous and less story-driven counterpart to the mission of the photojournalist’ (Sante, 2009:202).
Kerouac described Frank as a man with ‘agility, mystery, sadness, genius and a secret strangeness’. In original introduction to The Americans he wrote ‘Anybody doesnt like these pitchers dont like potry, see?’, ‘with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world’ (Kerouac, 1978:5-9). The similarities between the two men are hard to ignore; both had a love for the road, and both travelled extensively in the name of their art. Kerouac’s intense beat style writing, in prose and delivery, is comparable to way Frank asks us to view his images in his book: At a fast pace through critical, melancholic glasses. In 2004 Frank (Bakare, 2019) told the Guardian Newspaper; ‘The kind of photography I did is gone. It’s old. There’s no point in it any more for me, and I get no satisfaction from trying to do it. There are too many pictures now. It’s overwhelming.’
Prior to The Americans Frank’s work had a more international flavour and is interesting to understand as it provides and insight into the development of Frank’s photographic philosophy that is instantiated in The Americans. In 1948 he photographed in Peru, the resulting images were first only complied in a small number of handmade maquettes, but in 2008 were commercially published by Steidl under Franks supervision (Steidl, 2020). In Peru: Photographs by Robert Frank (2008), it is apparent that the development of the photographers aesthetic sensibilities are being developed. The book is a candid and respectful portrayal of the everyday and its participants that constitutes the soul of a nation. The 38 photographs are presented without introduction or exegesis, so the images and sequencing are truly left to speak for themselves. Alex Sweetman (2008) has observed that:
‘The front and back cover of Peru repeat the first and last images in the text and create a kind of cycle where the end and the beginning are continuous and time (modernity, European civilization) is virtually absent from people who live on the very margins of existence, and amongst whom we are one. To say that the photographs are up close and personal is to restate the obvious. They are, after all, Robert Frank’s photographs, taken as if from the inside’.
Between 1948 and 1952 Frank shot the images in Europe, the USA and Peru, for his book Black White and Things (1994) (see figure 25). Again, any thorough explanation or contextualisation of the work is absent from the publication. However, the book does open with a pair of poetic quotes, the first from the early twentieth century French writer Antoine de Saint-Exuopéry:
‘it is only with the heart that one can see rightly what is essential is invisible to the eye’
And the second from Frank himself:
‘somber people and black events quiet people and peaceful places and the things people have come in contact with
this, I try to show in my photographs’
These vignettes serve to align the readers psyche with that of the photographer and succour the softening up of the readers preconceptions, by opening a path to a new perspective. One that sees beyond the overt descriptive force of the photographs and into the souls of the subjects and their environments.
Frank also guides us through his work by dividing the book into three parts: Black, White and Things. Initially it may seem that Frank is contradicting himself by cataloguing his images based on their descriptive content, however the division of images has been dictated by the emotional state they provoke. The Black images reveal a melancholy and existential despair towards events beyond the horizon. The White images push back, they are positive and life affirming – in spite of it all we live to experience life. And in Things we are reminded not to hold on to the incorporeal, to see past the physical object perhaps it is a final reminder to look in the wake of his photographs when searching for their authenticity.
Frank’s mechanism of dependably communicating his paradoxical flavour of optimistic disquiet through photography is perhaps most apparent in Story Lines (2004). Published as a companion to its namesake exhibition at the Tate modern in London, we experience, alongside the aforementioned Peruvian expedition and his road trip around the United States, his work of 1951 created in the British capital; A post-war portrayal of a smog filled metropolis, still cleaving on to Empire and yet to find direction in a world that has moved from Geo to Bio-Political paradigms. The fatalistic, but ultimately life-affirming homogeneity that runs through all of Franks work, reveals that his concern is often not the subject in the frame, but photography itself and the ongoing existential crisis he is enduring alongside the medium.